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Religion for the wrong reasons. Or, how to push a person to her death.

ORDINARY CITIZEN'S NOTES. 2 JAN 2014. FRI. N1.Religion for the wrong reasons. Or, how to push a person to her death.

RELIGION is a curious thing.

Its Latin original is simple enough, but this simplicity has been used for the wrong reasons, and abused by those who have the power to insist on their myopic hermeneutics of life.

Religare, that was how it was. Originally.

Re + ligare--and that gives you an infinitive: to bind again.

It is related to 'ligation,' or to 'tubal ligation' for those too Catholic like that Philippine ambassador to the Vatican during Cory Aquino's time, and who, like Tomas Morato, was a moral police.

For those engaged in linguistics, it is ligature, that which binds words, ideas.

Religare and its noun, religion: this was the reason why Leelah Alcorn's mother brought her to a psychiatrist for the simple reason that, per her mother, that was something not within the bounds of her faith, her mother.

For her--the mother--God made people either man or woman, and the sexes are at the same time the genders. These are the sexualities too, and these remain within the binaries of the physiological and the anatomical.

Never mind that in real life, with its diversity, variety defines our civic life as well as the life there in the wild, with ecology teaching us to expand our thinking of what constitutes our limited understanding of human positive law, that interpretation of the according to the limited knowledge of human beings, the religious ones included.

There is so much to learn in Leelah's death, and our duty is to honor her death by listening to her in the silence of our heart: my death, she said, must have to have some meaning.

We cannot--parents and otherwise, philosophers and critics more so--fail her.

She admonishes parents in particular--and perhaps, psychiatrist and psychologists and counselors and teachers too:

"After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn't make mistakes, that I am wrong. If you are reading this, parents, please don't tell this to your kids.Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don't ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won't do anything but make them hate them self. That's exactly what it did to me."